Southern food

A bowl of creamy cheese grits. Food writer Erin Byers Murray hopes that exploring the story of grits will help spur more discussion about how food shapes our culture, as humble ingredients are elevated into expensive dishes even as we come to terms with long-lost, or ignored, origin stories that deserve recognition.
Lauri Patterson/Getty Images
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You Can Eat Like Johnny Cash — Thanks To A Cookbook From Country Music's First Family

Carla Hall has a new book that explores her heritage and attempts to bring soul food to a wider audience. She embarked on a long journey through the South to investigate and get inspiration, and the story is a deep look into her philosophy.
Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post via Getty Images
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Fried chicken and mac and cheese: A study suggests Southern cuisine may be at the center of a tangled web of reasons why black people in America are more prone to hypertension than white people.
Robert Manella/Getty Images
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ACP at Cancun Restaurant in Crossville, Tenn. This cheese-covered Southern interpretation of arroz con pollo is not the saffron-colored rice and golden chicken that many Latinos who grew up eating the dish would recognize. But ACP nonetheless helped build Mexican restaurant empires across the South.
Gustavo Arellano
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Even After 100 Years, People Are Still Reaching For The Moon(Pie)

A vintage postcard from the Peach Tree State. Georgia isn't the biggest producer of the pink-orange fruit. So why are its peaches so iconic? The answer has a lot to do with slavery — its end and a need for the South to rebrand itself.
Found Image Holdings Inc/Getty Images
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This upland rice is a remarkable link between West Africa, the Gullah-Geechee sea islands of the American South, and the Merikin settlements of southern Trinidad.
Courtesy of Francis Morean
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Vishwesh Bhatt is the executive chef of Snackbar, a restaurant in Oxford, Miss. And he's winning acclaim as one of the region's best chefs for Indian-inflected Southern fare that reflects a changing South.
Danny Klimetz for NPR
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Mississippi Masala: How A Native Of India Became A Southern Cooking Star

African runner peanuts were once a defining flavor of the South, memorialized in songs, peanut fritters, peanut soup and in Charleston's signature candy, the peanut-and-molasses groundnut cake. But by the 1930s the nuts had all but disappeared.
Courtesy of Brian Ward
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African-American Museum Cafe Serves Up Black History With Every Forkful

Phila Hach (standing, center) and her husband, Adolf Hach, are seen here with Minnie Pearl (right) of Grand Ole Opry fame, and an unidentified woman. "What the Grand Ole Opry did for country music, she has done for Southern food," one food writer wrote about Hach.
Courtesy of the Hach Family
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Phila Hach, Who Spread The Gospel Of Southern Cuisine, Dies At 89

Waiter carriers pass food to passengers on a train stopping in Gordonsville, Va., in this undated photo. After the Civil War, local African-American women found a route to financial freedom by selling their famous fried chicken and other home-made goods track-side.
Courtesy of the Town of Gordonsville
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The salty suspects: Some 70 percent of the cheeses, soups, cold cuts and pizzas we buy at the grocery store exceed the Food and Drug Administration's "healthy" labeling standards for salt. Since we eat so much bread, it is — perhaps surprisingly — the top contributor of sodium to our diets.
iStockphoto; Deborah Austin/Flickr; Beckman's Bakery/Flickr; iStockphoto; The Pizza Review/Flickr
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Eat, Drink And Be Scholarly: The Southern Food and Beverage Museum's new, permanent home in New Orleans is designed to help answer many questions — including "How does it taste?"
Stephen Binns/Courtesy of SoFAB
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Instead of throwing out the nutritious broth that's left over when you cook down greens, why not use it as the base for a delicious dish like this rockfish with clams in a garlic-shallot pot liquor sauce?
Alison Aubrey/NPR
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